The present invention relates to a mobile support for electronic equipment and managing such mobile support. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to the automated repositioning of servers or other large electronic systems in a data centre or similar environments.
A data centre comprises infrastructure catering to the various requirements of the electronic systems it houses, including cooling, power supply, network resources, fire control, etc. The resources available to satisfy these requirements are necessarily finite, and the infrastructure generally imposes further constraints on the resources that can conveniently be made available at any physical point in the data centre environment. For example, excessive demands on any one resource in a particular location may well mean that the full requirements of all systems at that location cannot be met, thereby limiting the performance of some or all of these systems, even if satisfactory resources may have been available at an alternative location.
One response to this problem is to build a substantial redundancy into the system so as to handle such localized peaks in demand. This however can considerably increase the expense and complexity of the centre, for infrastructure that is only occasionally used. Other partial solutions may include analysis of air flow or intelligent control of air conditioning so as to obtain the maximum benefit from available cooling, smarter hardware with lower energy consumption, smarter software to optimize usage of resources, and so on. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,214,131 describes an airflow distribution control system for use in a raised floor data centre, which has sensors coupled to under floor partition, to detect parameters indicative of airflow distribution, and accordingly controls flow resistance of partition. Furthermore, it is known from US Patent Publication 20080004837A1 to generate a dynamic power flux map for computer systems in data centres, involving correlating locations of computer systems, determined using preset tags on systems, with dynamic traces of power consumption of computer systems.
Nevertheless, none of the above approaches has been found to be entirely satisfactory.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional data centre environment. As shown, there is provided a plurality of computers 140, 150, 160, each of which may contain a network interface 161, a processor 162, and one or more environment sensors, such as temperature sensors 163. Each computer 140, 150, 160 is connected to a power connection such as the connection 132, and a network connection 135. As shown in FIG. 1, the power consumption through the power connection is monitored by the power monitoring module 131, which is also connected to the network connection 135 through which power consumption information may be reported to a processor 112. The processor 112 is also connected to one or more environment sensors 111, such as temperature sensors. The processor may thus receive information concerning the values of the environment sensors 163 and 111, from the power monitoring module 131, and from the network connection 135 itself. On the basis of the received information, the processor may attempt to adjust workloads of the respective computers or the distribution of cool air as a function of detected conditions as described in the cited prior art.